ISRAEL: Islamic Jihad leaders said yesterday they had agreed to cease firing rockets from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, if Israel ended its aerial attacks on Gaza. But a shoot-out just hours later in the West Bank, in which two Jihad men were killed by Israeli soldiers, immediately threatened the latest efforts to end a week of escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Troops surrounded a home in the West Bank village of Qabatiyeh in the late afternoon and exchanged fire with two men inside. Israeli military officials said they believed one of the militants killed was involved in the suicide attack that killed five Israelis last week in the central town of Hadera. Qabatiyeh was the home town of the bomber, who said he was taking revenge for the killing of a senior Islamic Jihad commander by Israeli forces in the West Bank a week ago.
The latest exchange follows a week of violence in which a total of eight Palestinians, three of them civilians, have been killed in Israeli air strikes that have targeted Islamic Jihad militants.
The Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, has been engaged in discussions with the various armed groups in an effort to restore calm. Islamic Jihad leaders in Gaza said yesterday that if Israel stopped its aerial assaults, they would cease firing rockets. "If the enemy ends its attack, our commitment to calm will be preserved," said Khaled el-Batash, an Islamic Jihad leader.
But while security sources in Israel said that the aerial assaults would cease if the rocket fire ended, they insisted that actions against Islamic Jihad members would continue. "We are carrying out a broad operation against terrorism, a broad operation against the Islamic Jihad infrastructure in light of Islamic Jihad's intention to continue with suicide bombings," defence minister Shaul Mofaz said ahead of the weekly cabinet meeting.
The militant Hamas group has been conspicuously absent from the latest round of hostilities. It is gearing up for Palestinian parliamentary elections in January and fears that involvement in attacks on Israel would not only spark a harsh Israeli response that would disrupt its election preparations, but could also provide Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas with a pretext for again postponing the vote.